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PipeWire 0.3.62

gitlab.freedesktop.org

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Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#31

Post by trifurcate »

mort96 wrote: post #22
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS b…

Excuse my ignorance, but don't monitors take their clock signal from the host? I would think that synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate is a mismatch to handle on the display end, not the host end where frames might get doubled or skipped (and eventually introduce long-term timing errors). This is assuming an 60Hz rate advertised by the monitor.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#32

Post by denton-scratch »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Firefox can't do sound with raw ALSA. No, I know that doesn't explain why PulseAudio exists. But I think Pipewire can do more - isn't it supposed to be able to move video around as well as audio? Or something.

I also just use raw ALSA. It's there anyway, it works, and I don't need more daemons (I don't need NetworkManager either).

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#33

Post by trifurcate »

jelicicm wrote: post #5

Stumbled into PipeWire few months ago when trying to setup Bluetooth headset on Ubuntu OS. It's superior to PulseAudio, but... Really unbelievable to comprehend that Linux distros have such bad support for Bluetooth audio headsets - something very common in today's tech world. Android, Windows and Apple's OS all very efficiently switch from A2DP codec which is excellent for audio playback, but has no possibility for…

My personal experience is the opposite-- although this behavior perhaps isn't desirable for end users who don't want to fiddle with their codec selection, being able to switch between A2DP and HSP manually in pavucontrol provides me with a much superior experience compared to Windows which would a) keep my headset in HSP because of some rogue application with a stuck open mic and make it really difficult to track it down/undo it and b) (rarely) keep my headset in A2DP while an application is attempting to grab audio or switch it to A2DP in the middle of meetings and break everything until I restart the application trying to use my mic. In my experience, a manual codec switch is a much smoother experience, ironically.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#34

Post by bluGill »

mort96 wrote: post #22
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS b…

Don't forget that while you might not notice a 20 minute video taking 1.2 seconds more than 20 minutes - but you will notice if the audio plays at the correct speed and ends after exactly 20 minutes - and you will probably notice before the video ends.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#35

Post by mort96 »

bluGill wrote: post #34
mort96 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS b…

Don't forget that while you might not notice a 20 minute video taking 1.2 seconds more than 20 minutes - but you will notice if the audio plays at the correct speed and ends after exactly 20 minutes - and you will probably notice before the video ends.

Yeah, you obviously have to sync audio and video with each other. It's just usually not that important to sync the audio and video with some "true" time as measured by an atomic clock.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#36

Post by bluGill »

RedShift1 wrote: post #23
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

Because the complexity of audio is hard. If you just have a desktop system with stereo speakers it is easy. However if you ever plug a set of headphones in things get hard. Should all sound now go through the headphones or not? Different people will want different answers (I have headphones plugged in all the time, but I'm not wearing them all the time, so if someone sends me an IM I need the beep to come out the regular speakers). There are monitors that have built in speakers making this harder, does the user have better speakers plugged into the computer output or not?

That is the regular desktop user. If you do any for of audio processing (pod casting, music recording) you may have a large number of different inputs and output connected, and want to do mixing of some sort. Likewise if you do videos you may have more than one "webcam" that you want to mix. These are fairly common use cases (many people have a dream of being a musician or an actor, and so have this type of setup that they are trying to use in the efforts to make it big)

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#37

Post by mort96 »

trifurcate wrote: post #31
mort96 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS b…

Excuse my ignorance, but don't monitors take their clock signal from the host? I would think that synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate is a mismatch to handle on the display end, not the host end where frames might get doubled or skipped (and eventually introduce long-term timing errors). This is assuming an 60Hz rate advertised by the monitor.

I don't know whether the clock is technically in the host machine or in the monitor, I imagine it depends on the type of connection. But the idea of a different "display clock" and "playback clock" still applies, since a program's own timekeeping based on usleep + gettimeofday will be different from the monitor clock, wherever that happens to reside.

And unless you're using some kind of variable refresh rate, the monitor always, always refreshes on a fixed interval. It doesn't do any "synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate". But with VSync, you can synchronize your software with the display refreshes, which is how you can decide to draw every frame twice and that sort of stuff.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#38

Post by worthless-trash »

spion wrote: post #29
jelicicm wrote: post #5

Stumbled into PipeWire few months ago when trying to setup Bluetooth headset on Ubuntu OS. It's superior to PulseAudio, but... Really unbelievable to comprehend that Linux distros have such bad support for Bluetooth audio headsets - something very common in today's tech world. Android, Windows and Apple's OS all very efficiently switch from A2DP codec which is excellent for audio playback, but has no possibility for…

What is really unbelieveable is that Bluetooth still cannot do high quality full duplex streams in 2022, and that anyone that wants to use wireless has to accept sounding like a telephone line / old radio from the early 90ties in meetings.

When I ask sales people "does their bluetooth headset actually do high quality full duplex streams" they give me the strangest look.

I am glad to see that I'm not the only one asking for this, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#39

Post by lazyier »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #30
lionkor wrote: post #14

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. A…

> That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. How is that "better than pulse ever did"? The only issue I had with PulseAudio on severa…

I estimate about 75% chance it's a configuration problem on his end.

The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.

This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature.

This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire.

The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot.

Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.

Re: PipeWire 0.3.62

#40

Post by sylware »

I was expecting pipewire to provide a pulseaudio ABI compatibility without the cost of the pulseaudio SDK(glib), that for 1 steam game. Well, it pulls glib into the SDK too. I forgot about that game, and I am back on my good friend alsa. The software mixer (dmix/pulseaudio/pipewire/jack/whatever) is hidden behind the alsa API.
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